Energi 3.1 Hard Fork: Asgard Is Here!
It has been just over a year since Energi Gen 3 went live on March 12, 2020. Gen 3 brought with it the enhanced Ethereum compatibility and smart contract capabilities that have powered our expansion into Decentralized Finance (DeFi) with Energiswap and Energi Bridge. The Gen 3 migration was a huge step for Energi toward our vision of delivering a secure, efficient platform for the future of DeFi.
We are always looking to improve Energi in every way we can, and after a year of hard work by the Energi Team, we are now ready to announce the first hard fork of Gen 3 — Energi 3.1 Asgard. Focused on improving stability and improving user experience, on August 25 the 3.1 hard fork will bring a host of improvements to support our ongoing push into DeFi.
After conducting extensive simulation of our new difficulty algorithm, we activated the Asgard hard fork on our testnet on August 16.
What Is Getting Better?
The primary change introduced by the 3.1 hard fork will be an overhaul of the difficulty algorithm. The Asgard hard fork brings a new difficulty algorithm that will eliminate the difficulty crashes and chain splits that the Energi blockchain has occasionally experienced since the Gen 3 migration. It will also improve the consistency of staking rewards and result in fewer lost blocks on the chain. This will improve our ability to estimate staking rewards as well, providing stakers with a more accurate picture of expected returns.
The Energi 3.1 Asgard difficulty algorithm is a new type of difficulty algorithm based on a PID controller. A PID controller uses three terms: a P term representing the present, an I term representing the past, and a D term representing the future, in order to make highly accurate and efficient difficulty adjustments. By contrast, all other cryptocurrencies use only a P controller to adjust the difficulty. By only accounting for the present state of block time, P controller difficulty algorithms are prone to overshooting the mark and oscillating around the target.
In our simulation, we found that the new Asgard difficulty algorithm outperforms others by a huge margin. One relevant comparison is the recent 60% hash rate drop in Bitcoin, which faulted the BTC block time by up to 250% and took over 2 months to resolve. When we simulated this scenario with our new difficulty algorithm, we only saw about a 25% block time fault that resolved within a few hours.
Overall, the 3.1 hard fork will bring a new level of stability to Energi across the board, which in turn will improve the security of the network as we continue to scale up and introduce new products to the ecosystem such as Energi Bridge and Energi Synthetic Assets.
How to Prepare
For holders of Energi, there will be no preparation needed. Your NRG will remain secure in your wallet and will not be affected in any way by the hard fork.
For masternode runners and stakers, you will need to ensure that you update your core node software to version 3.1.0 prior to the hard fork block. If you don’t, you will end up on a split chain and may need to manually reconfigure your node.
Summary
Following a short period of testing on our testnet, the Energi 3.1 hard fork will be coming to the Energi Mainnet on August 25. It will bring with it an overhauled difficulty algorithm that will deliver a new level of stability to the Energi ecosystem.
The new algorithm will eliminate a number of the technical issues experienced by node runners since the Gen 3 migration, preparing Energi to scale up and add new products to our DeFi suite. It will also improve the consistency and predictability of staking rewards.
